Modern mobile communications devices (MCDs) offer more functionality than the traditional single use mobile speech telephone. These devices can include an address book, a calendar, a web browser, a digital music player, an emailer, a text messager, a word processor, a camera, and other applications. User-specific collections of text data are typically associated with each of these applications. For example, an address book typically contains the proper names of the user's contacts, and the digital music player includes music descriptors of the user's music collection, such as artist and song names. As the number of applications resident on a mobile communications device proliferates, these collections of text data can represent an increasingly large body of the user's personal information.
Speech recognition capabilities are often included in these devices for command-and-control of the device and as an input modality for one or more applications. Recently, some mobile devices have included a large vocabulary (about 30,000 words) speaker-independent speech recognizer to enable users to perform speech-to-text messaging. However, the vocabularies of such speech recognizers are predetermined and do not take advantage of collections of the user's personal information that may be resident on the mobile device.